Globales Produktionsmanagement

Global manufacturing operations unlock new opportunities for international companies to achieve competitive superiority. Effectively exploiting and benefitting from the national market and resource advantages on every site location becomes a crucial necessity.

However, managing global activities in a dynamic environment is like trying to hit a moving target. Decisions have to be made on the architecture of the manufacturing network, on the capabilities and site-roles assigned to each facility, on coordination mechanisms for daily operations as well as for product, process or know-how transfers; while stakeholders, tech-nology and environment are changing the business continuously. Facing a broad range of partially conflicting challenges, managers run the risk of losing themselves in optimising details. But striving for local optima avoids achieving a global optimum from a network per-spective.

The Competence Centre for Global Production Management addresses the emerging challenges of companies acting in today's worldwide dispersed manufacturing environment. We develop novel and integrated management approaches to configure and coordinate global operations in line with the overall manufacturing strategy. Our solutions combine state-of-the-art research knowledge and deep insights into industry practices based on close collaborations with leading manufacturing companies.

Our current projects cover the following topics:

Global manufacturing strategy development and alignment with business strategy
(Re-)design and management of manufacturing networks (incl. network quick-check)
Optimisation of global operations
Design of R&D and manufacturing interfaces in a global environment
Definition of site roles including lead factory concepts